Even if you've never seen Attack of the Crab Monsters, you probably still know it by heart. It is the perfect model of the drive-in B-movie, a sublime mix of papier-mache creatures, suggestive sexuality, and dodgy science, with just a bit of cold-war philosophy thrown in for tang.

Maybe I don't understand what courage is anymore. I sat in a movie theater recently, listening to people of all ages applaud and cheer when the key character was drinking excessively and stealing other people's money. I don't think either one of those things is worthy of cheering. Am I wrong? Did I get taken by the Rocky montages of the 80s, believing that courage comes from facing fear?

That's the big take-away from Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, an ultra-violent Hong Kong martial arts film that doesn't so much tell a story as throw buckets of gore around and hope that viewers will, Rorschach-like, synthesize meaning from the incoherent mess.

We need a new national conversation about the culture that produces both lousy and great movies, about a culture that embraces violence as the necessary price of freedom, about the kind of human beings we are becoming.

Sit back, unwrap your Big Mac, pour a nice, hearty bowl of Skittles, open up a can of Coca-Cola, keep a roll of Brawny paper towels handy, shut off your Sears power tools, and join Andrea Lipinski, Kevin Lauderdale, and I as we tackle one of cinema's true monuments of awfulness.

Temple of Bad clerics Andrea Lipinsky, Kevin Lauderdale and I shed our vestments and put on our widest lapels to celebrate this landmark of singing, skating, and really glowy people, a movie with a theme song so infectious that you will never be able to shake it from your memory.

This is an episode of Temple of Bad that includes several firsts. It's our first discussion of a black-and-white film. It's our first discussion of a film that has such a ridiculously short running time.

Included in its list of crimes: entrusting the Beatles' most innovative work to the likes of the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, Steve Martin and Alice Cooper, among an almost infinite roster of incomprehensible casting choices.

Perhaps the right hungry, Jackie Chiles-style lawyer could lead the charge on suing moviemakers for malpractice and getting the American public some compensation for all the crappy films they have had to endure.